Phil Fruitfly 2D Animation

Some of you know this guy, some of you not. I found this old character animation somewhere in my data backups and I want to share it with all of you!

Jeff's Adventures #6

The brick wall is getting real!

Guys! I just found a clothes basket full of lego bricks in the garret! 

I was totally freaking out when I found it and started to build right after making sure that nobody heard my overreaction :D Have a look at the result!

The Wall - Brick landscape

Just another brick landscape because I love it!

African brick landscape

I had some fun while building another brick landscape!

Friday the 13th Photoshop Experiments

Here you can see some photoshop experiments of my Friday the 13th and Fullmoon artwork. Which one do you like most?

Jeff's Adventures #5

Brick Landscape Tutorial - Minecraft style

In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a brick landscape fast and easy.

First step: Create the bricks.

1. Draw a square and rotate it to 45 degrees. 
2. Scale it to the half size of the original square. Don't scale it evenly - compress it like in the images. 
3. Duplicate it to get the basement and pull it to the lower angle of your first square.
4. Create some rectangles for the side walls.

This is your brick which will be your initial object for everything else you create. 

Second Step: Make the bricks unique.

1. Add some details like little stones or grass.
2. Create 3-4 different bricks of a kind to make your final landscape look random.
3. Add some shadows. Your final image will look more 3-dimensional.

That's it! Now you can start to build your landscape. My landscape will be a snowy mountain with a vale full of fir trees. 

It will take a time until you can copy a group of bricks to another place to go on faster. It's a bit like building with lego bricks or building in Minecraft - I like it!

Here you can see my final landscape. I did some photoshop actions later to get some more atmosphere!

Friday the 13th Fullmoon Story

Khaleesi auf der Flucht!

Vor wem?  Wieso?  Wird sie entkommen?  Das werdet ihr bald erfahren! 

Dieses Bild ist ein kleiner Vorgeschmack auf das, womit ich mich gerade beschäftige. Ich bin gespannt wie sich das kleine "Projekt" entwickelt.

El Don Fail mit Hintergrund

"Gib deinen Figuren mal etwas Hintergrund, das würde sicher viel ausmachen!" - Et voilà! :)

Tyrion Lannister

Mein erster Versuch einen Menschen nachzubauen: Tyrion Lannister!

In meinem vorhergehenden Post findet ihr das Making-Of!

FlaminLego

Schwuppdiwupp entstand aus einem Legobaustein ein neuer Character! 

Eventuell bekommt er mit der Zeit noch Freunde... mal sehen :)

El Don Fail - Posing

Wie versprochen eine weitere Pose von El Don Fail, zur Verdeutlichung seines Charakters!

Diesmal sogar mit einem Making-Of-Video!

El Don Fail

Mein neuer Superheld! Ist mir spontan eingefallen als ich versucht habe ein Maskottchen für das Game Lab zu entwerfen. Ich finde er hat Potential und ist definitiv ein Kandidat! :'D

Jeff's Adventures #4

Jeff's Adventures #3

How to create a character idle animation and save it as .gif

This is my first tutorial which I hope will show you one easy way doing short animations for web.

Step 1 - Before creating a character -Think about what he will do in your animation!

If he will move his whole body like dancing you have to think about bones and joints.

My character Destroyer96 has no special breaks or joints in his body because I just want him stay and look around in a loop.

So please think about it before you start because it is horrible to make a character „animationable“ after creating him „non-animationable“.

Step 2 - Before you start to animate -Think about how much steps you need.

Normally an animated film is produced with 24 frames per second. And as you see in popular animation films, these characters are smooth in their movement because they have 24 steps in 24 frames per second. 

If you do 24 steps with different positions of you character, it would be really annoying because it is really much!

In my game Wranglers, my walk cycles include 12 steps. My animations are not that smooth but for human eyes it is okay to watch if the movement is fast like running!

If you summon my requirements you need for example 12+12+12+12 steps for 4 seconds. 48 steps means 48 pictures to illustrate. The good point is that some of these steps have a repitition :)

Here you can see my illustrations so you can use them as an inspiration for yourself:

My Plan: Destroyer96 lifts his right foot 3-4 times while he's watching down. After that he will take a deep breath!

What I do is creating a character for my first frame as you see in the first picture. Destroyer96 stands here without anything special. Than I create my first special position like the highest point of lifting a feet. After that I use the Blend-Tool of Adobe Illustrator to create the steps between. If you use more steps your animation will be more smooth and slow.

I repeat this procedure until I have all steps of my animation.
There are a lot more ways to do this, but I think this is the easiest way to start with short animations.

Step 3 - Summon your steps to an animation

For this I use Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop's timeline. I copy my steps to Photoshop and create 48 layers. These layers I put in the timeline and Photoshop can export all these frames as a .gif. It is really easy but you have to make sure that your illustrations are all at the same position and not centered so that you don't have any jerkiness. 

This is my final .gif I made it very slow so that you can see the steps between :)